Development of the Resurrection Body

Development of the Resurrection Body A multi-part electronic class by Ravani Rah Weiner 2000, Ravani Rah Weiner. All Rights Reserved. When my thirteen-year-old son David died in 1990, it became imperative for me to find his soul. Where had he gone? Imagine how the scope of that desire has widened today in the wake of the terrorist attack of September 11th. An entire nation wants to find over 6000 precious souls. And we wonder where everything that made up an individual life has gone for each of them. Where has each identifiable characteristic, each accomplishment gone? Can the existence of a life be obliterated so easily? Could our own life be obliterated so easily? What if I told you that every bit of the individuality of each one of the people has been preserved and in fact they are still alive in all but one sense of the word...and it is possible for you to have a bodily experience of them? I have found that I can still hug my son. I know now that our lives do go on and my conviction is a miracle identifiable by the fact that my heart has been healed in the knowledge I have found. A medicine that can heal the heart of a mother whose son has died may provide some relief for others who grieve. Part of the miracle here is that the answer for me came from a very esoteric realm of Islam. It is part of the body of wisdom which Suhrawardi and others brought from the Zoroastrian tradition to rejuvenate Islam in the thirteenth century. The source of this was the book Spiritual Body and the Celestial Earth by Henry Corbin, which was a book in my husband's library that almost flew off the shelf as an answer to my prayers. I have since found Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam and Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, both by Corbin, to be equally helpful. Corbin traces very carefully the existence of a world through which resurrection comes to pass, a world that is an "external" world yet not the physical world, a world that teaches us it is possible to emerge from physical space without emerging from extent. He tells us that the perception of this other world depends on a very special use of our imagination which can become "royal" or "true" imagination. It then acts in a transforming way, able to add new depth to our perceptions. "Changing physical datum imprinted on the senses in a pure mirror, a spiritual transparency, thus the Earth with its things and beings are raised to incandescence, to a diaphanous state which allows the apparition of their subtle states to penetrate to the visionary intuition." It is impossible to understand Corbin's explanation very well unless you are able to awaken to a multidimensional reality. If you can pay attention long enough, your prize is the development of an ability or process which transcends time and space. Only those who are desperate enough can do so. Do I have your attention? I had begun an exploration which was to look at wisdom sources like Zoroastriansim, Greek gnosticism and 13th century Islam to find answers to my questions about: 1. Where is my son? 2. How do we know what is real? 3. How can we prepare for eternity? 4. What is the meaning of living and dying?

What I crave more than anything is to hug my son. But this quest is just part of my other quest- to taste satisfaction- to bring the body to the spirit- to give bodyness to spirit. Where do we find an embodied spirit? How can we merge body and spirit? The place of subtle tasting. This is a realm we have lost as a culture...in the scheme of things we have mind which is explored by intellect and bodyness which is explored by the 5 senses but no meeting ground in between. Is it possible to assign reality to something without using the 5 senses? What is real? Indeed I felt I was led by my own deceased son to a book which took me a long way to my goal. One evening a book "Spiritual Body-Celestial Earth" seemed to call out to me. I began to read the dense, challenging text by Henry Corbin, an Islamicist and spiritual seeker as well. After poring over the book for 11 years, meditating on it and making the myths and processes in it my own, I find some themes that answer my questions. I share with you my interpretation of these wisdom teachings as they have congealed into an understanding of the wrold, how we transform and go on even after death. "Spiritual Body-Celestial Earth" speaks of a process by which a person can establish a living connection with God, an "eye of the world beyond" which can see deeper connections behind everything that exists in the material world (what Pir Vilayat calls that which transpires behind that which appears). Through this living relationship with the Deity, which establishes resonance between these perceived worlds, a person begins to fashion a kind of fabric of being based on a pattern he discovers in his own soul. This fabric, which is the resurrection body, resides in a place which is called by Suhrawardi "Na Koja Abad", the place that is no place, a place created from the last sesame seed sized bit of matter that created the universe. It is the "open sesame" seed which can open up into a world in which this material world is like a piece of sand on a beach. Like the men he translated, Henry Corbin termed the organ which penetrated this place the "active imagination" but he made it clear that it was more than just fantasy. As it was honed and perfected it could develop into what was called the "imaginatio vera " , or the true imagination, which could see worlds behind worlds as well as align itself with the source of all imaginations, the Creator. The material is the best description of what has been called the "philosophy of light" that was introduced into Islam from Zoroastriansim by Ibn Arabi, Suhrawardi and others of the 12th-15th century. It presents a system whereby individuals can 1. Reestablish their connection with the Divine in a personal way- becoming God's Well Beloved 2. Awaken a process in themselves which unveils hidden realities, heals physical and emotional wounds, encourages creativity (on amazing levels) and transforms them into multidimensional beings. 3. Participate consciously in the creation of their resurrection body 4. Develop a feeling of deep satisfaction by locating the place where all dreams are fulfilled. So let's go back to our Zoroastrian way of looking at things. At the age of fifteen, the aspirant made a pledge to live as a child of the archangel of the Earth (Spenta Armaiti) which established their existence in harmony with a being of light, in fact, an entire world of light which existed in support of them. It established the aspirant's essential dualitude an an incarnate being of light who had agreed to enter into life to wage the battle of life. The celestial partner of this being of light (in this tradition the essential

dualitude is a relation of light with light, not darkness with light) is called the fravarti who stays in the world of light and receives all that the incarnate soul feeds back to it, like an object feeds back into its image in a mirror. This is the lovely angel in whose gaze we are eternally held with such tenderness. It is the heavenly twin who cherishes our individuality and beholds everything that happens to us. The Zoroastians pledged that they would "assume Spentarmaitikh" which was to exemplify in theri presence the mode of existence of Spenta Armaiti. This meant to reproduce in themselves the "thought of wisdom" which was further described as "perfect thought under the pure gaze of love." Supposedly, this would henceforth allow a space called the "heavenly Earth, the house opf which Spenta Armaiti was the mistress" to open up within their lives. Perfect thought was later called the mater vitae, the "mother of Iife", a power capable of bringing life and vitality. Theirs was a living devotion, through which spirits were embodied and the physical world was continually refreshed with spirit. Zoroastrian Angel Meditation First, imagine the aspect of God who is your own angel. Feel the pull of love between you like a magnet aligning all the parts of your being. Feel the at-one-ness of your being with this celestial self, except that you have acquired some things as a result of living...some scars, some experiences, some treasures, some learnings, some magic which you now allow to "feed back" to your angel. Your angel will take these new impressions and rearrange them for you. You will become renewed in the realization of your celestial self, if you let go of these impressions. This only works because the celestial self is a part of us, and really is from where we grow and change. So it is ourselves that we become as we let go of who we are (which is really who we WERE, still hanging on). If the soul holds nothing back, then this whole manifestation is fed back- the process is reversed. Flowing out becomes flowing in. Like going in back of the mirror ( in Alice in Wonderland). We create a self reflecting surface- all the light is fed back. Not like this person looking at that. A special process emerges as light shines upon light. Instead of focusing on the thing perceived (what have I lost), we can turn attention in on itself and work it in such a way that it becomes a solution to the problem. We usually perceive passively like a screen receiving a picture. What if we work with the surface of the screen, allow it to acquire depth - thicken it out - and allow it an inner transparency so that things projected upon it now are in touch with much more. There is even a shape of the entire surface that enables a special focusing of all the parts that you had never learned to focus together... I found the shape of my screen to be the face of my celestial self.. Which is the my face as that self sees me. Now with this increased resonance, a search (for my son....for what you will) is a much simpler task. NA KOJA ABAD (The Land of No-Where) Some of you may know my husband, Azar Baksh Weiner. He has been teaching a well-attended and fascinating class called Science and Spirituality at our beloved All Saints' Church. One of the amazing ideas he has taught

us is the fact that you can't speak of what happened before the Big Bang because in fact our time(and space) began with the Big Bang. What I am going to attempt to do is talk you into undoing the Big Bang, in a way...to undo space and time because I know my departed son Dave lives beyond space and time. The Sufis of Suhrawardi's time spoke of a place called Na Koja Abad, which meant The Land of No-Where. In the experience of the spiritual seeker, we come to sense, first, that we are living in a oppressive condition, and then, we seek our true home beyond. "What is the road that leads out of it? How long is it? It is at the point of departure that you arrive there again. But the self that is found there is the one that is a superior self. ..when one is there he has achieved the aptitude that makes him like a balm, a drop of which you distill in the hollow of your hand by holding it facing the sun, and which then passes through to the back of your hand." from H. Corbin, "Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam". This description is the transition from our perception of the "world of the senses", or zahir, to the internal, or the batin . In the internal condition one experiences no localization in space... "but an odd thing happens once this transition occurs, this reality once internal and hidden is revealed to be enveloping, surrounding and containing all that was external and visible." - H. Corbin, "Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam" We are not talking here of a mental experience but of one which merges mind and bodiness. This kind of vocabulary may be strange to us because in our culture we have consented to a divorce between the world of the senses and the world of the mind while in the culture of the ancient Sufis there existed a realm of the imaginal which filled in that gap. "When you learn in the treatises of the ancient sages that there exists a world provided with dimensions and extension other than the pleroma of the Intelligences, do not hasten to call it a lie, for pilgrims of the spirit may contemplate that world and they find there everything that is the object of their desire." from "Spiritual Body, Celestial Earth" While my son was dying and soon after he had died, I could feel him caressing me, like a wide warm sensation all around. I "knew" his words to me just like I think things myself but I knew them to be his words, and they comforted me and brought me peace from him and from those beings that were helping him transition. But one day he told me that he wouldn't be able to come to me in the same way anymore, that I had to come up to where he was, in a way. When I heard about the realm of Na Koja Abad, I knew it was sure it was the place I could hug my son. The secret of healing is to rise by the power of belief above the limitations of this world of variety that one may touch by the power of intellect the oneness of the whole Being. -Hazrat Inayat Khan "Inversion" Induction What was key was that place of inversion-I began to collect statements that seemed to bring me to the internal condition that somehow preserved dimensionality and extension in space, though not a usual sense of space. One was the statement above that "a balm, one drop of which you instill by holding it facing the sun and which passes through to the back of your hand". Or as our own son( from his internal condition) actually instructed us to imagine looking into a mirror facing a mirror...it's like going behind the mirror, or reflecting 180 degrees but to a new dimension each time.

He also said to think of him just beyond where we are, like just above the surface of the water. What we experience as our "world" is the extension between a soul and that soul's sensory perceptions. The ancient Sufis spoke of the "physics" of a particular soul that defines a soul's particular world. Our "physics" is usually buried in our perception of the world like sugar is dissolved in sugar water. We can examine our own "physics" by learning to project our energies without the usual senses (meditation).Then we can consciously use our physics again in the sensory world (and the hereafter). It is possible to totally reconstruct ourselves( or experience ourselves as reconstructed differently) in a completely different way...in a highly organized self structure. It is a realization of self with many more dimensions...a reshuffling of all the points you had identified formerly as "world outside you", inner feelings, ideas, parts of your body, archetypes, etc., now as one being. (St. Teresa of Avila described it as a many faceted diamond.) Your being "thickens out"(like going from a flattened box to a 3-D box would be) allowing many more connections and points can be much closer than they were before in the flattened out version of self. The Zoroastrians spoke of the development of such a construction as the resurrection body, made of the substance Xvarnah, which is the same as radiance and glory(Nur), which Ahura Mazda caused to "superabound" in all beings. In the Sufi tradition, the universe is a bursting forth in the manner of a series of mirrors from the central Deity in a great urge to know Him/Herself in the eye of the Beloved One. Each epiphany or shell of the universe is and individual realm as well as connected to all the others. In fact, they are nested within the others, each one the "fruit" or the child of the one in back of it. I refer you back to the Zoroastrian Angel Meditation for a method of constructing the resurrection body. You offer all the points which define your world back to the source from which you have come. All the points of Xvarnah are returned, yet with your own signature, your own point of view which now reinvests the Whole with life, with an added dimension that wasn't there before. You claim your inheritance while knowing your individual contribution. My relationship with my son has also opened up communication with other beings in inner realms. One of these is my own father who died 26 years ago. In a marvelous dream I saw him doing what he does now on the other side, which looked like polishing "gems" which looked to me like nebulae I have seen in telescopes- they looked like sparkling star clouds of multiple dimensions. At a certain point in the dream I felt thirsty and asked my dad for water. He laughed and said, "How about this?" Suddenly I was aware of an immense waterfall which seemed like the essence of water- it quenched every aspect of thirst I ever had seemingly in the past, future, in any place, etc. It must have been the archetype of water. It was water from the Land of No Where. It is possible to experience ourselves in full bodiness and at the same time full of spirit, in communication with everyone we wish. The important thing is to work with our imagination- the organ by which we perceive things, the mastery of which establishes the resurrection body. The Active Imagination Let us discuss the organ which we use to perceive the things of the inner worlds, an organ which we said has atrophied in most people. It can function directly as a faculty and organ of knowledge as real as the sense organs. It is an archetypal image.

We can call it the active imagination, but we must keep in mind that we mean something very different from fantasy, or the usual interpretation of "imagination". We often think that what we perceive with our five senses is reality. That this is faulty can be demonstrated by the fact that things seem very different when we are in a bad mood, when we are sick, or especially when we are in love. Think about examples ofeach of these in your life, and how the world seemed to change because of your different point of view. Is it possible that we could work consciously with this point of view? Indeed this is what psychologists do to help people who have become stuck in a particularly self-harmful perspective. What we may not realize is that even a "healthy" perspective has been shaped by society and ones past. It is possible to dramatically alter ones perspective away from the "normal" and still function in a healthy, and hopefully even healthier way. So we see we can alter our perception of what we think of as reality, and perhaps expand it some. We can also perceive the hidden deeper levels in back of what we see with our usual senses. We do that as we become willing to surrender our pre-conceived, hardened concepts of reality for the genuine, fresh dispensations of meaning that are available. The assigning of meaning to things actually happens all the time, anyway. It is like the process of reading, which assigns images and meaning to marks of ink on paper. We have entire experiences because of meanings and groupings of meanings associated with words in stories and books. We also depend on our ability to penetrate the surface and make the deeper reality come forward whenever we enter into conversation with someone, or even enjoy a good meal. This occurs because the perceiver of all things is indeed the soul itself. But this ability to find meaning is just the first step. The imagination opens up into a whole world- the world of the soul. Imagination: unveils hidden levels breaks through to the "real" holds meaning is the place where people meet endures beyond the physical body becomes thickened" or many-faceted or "many-eyed" can become imaginatio vera- the imagination of the Divine A property of the imagination is also to transmute sensory data, resolving them into the purity of the subtle world, in order to restore them as symbols to be deciphered, the "key" being imprinted in the soul itself. Perception of this kind is equivalent to a "dematerialization", "Changing physical datum imprinted on the senses in a pure mirror, a spiritual transparency; thus the Earth with its things and beings are raised to incandescence, to a diaphanous state, which allows the apparition of their subtle states to penetrate to the visionary intuition." from Spiritual Body, Celestial Earth by H. Corbin. It unveils the hidden reality. Imagination grasps objects not in objectivity but as a sign, an intimation which is finally the soul's annunciation to itself. I leave you with my best attempt so far to summarize the process of recovering our multidimensionality, which is our resurrection body:

We have within our self a power to configure and bestow reality. We can even allow one reality to reflect on another reality. Also we can imbue a reality with a certain emotion or overall aura. Different combinations of the above produce a perception of movement through time-and-space. We automatically adopt the manner of configuring we have been taught...but sometimes we learn to completely redo, to undo, to teach ourselves the process. We can collect ourselves on the level of archetype, remember an existence in the realm where beingness is "in suspense" or not reflected on anything but itself. The manner in which we usually perceive isolates a "frame", like a still shot, of beingness and pulls individual elements away from the essential field to one of time-and-space. Thus I experience a cat or a chair. It is possible to return the "frame" or stillshot to its essential beingness. Thus the cat we have isolated returns to its essential state "in suspense." The once isolated part now exists as a free element in a series which includes multiple dimensions. So it is connected back to all the series of which it is an element. It is now in its real condition, not warped into our particular personal perception which was as the ancient Sufis called it an "accident", where one random "frame" is isolated out from its series. Imagine the image of a plant reflected in a mirror. If we analyze the material of that image, it would be the substance of the mirror- not really itself. But we could convince ourselves that the image was real. Everything we perceive is actually like an image reflected on a surface which we have created. It is possible to free the image from the surface so that it becomes what it really is- an element of many series in multiple dimensions. If we can do this with our "selves" we are delivered to the condition in which we are eternally refreshed, at one and in love. Personally, I went out for a hug and I ended up home. Contact the Author February 18, 2004 Home
Excerpted from Development of the Resurrection Body http://www.sufihealingorder.org/SHO/ISHO/classes/resurrectionbody.htm